ABRIXAS Satellite

Links

Web pages of the research department involved (now High-Energy Astrophysics)

Finished Projects

ABRIXAS

ABRIXAS was a national X-ray satellite with seven 27-fold nested Wolter-1 telescopes, sharing one 6 × 6 cm2 pn-CCD detector (copy of the EPIC camera developed for XMM-Newton) in the focus. Launched on April 28, 1999 ABRIXAS was supposed to perform the first complete all-sky survey with imaging telescopes in the medium energy X-ray range (0.5 - 15 keV). A three-years scanning mission was planned to detect at least 10.000 new hard X-ray sources obscured by gas and dust clouds and to study diffuse X-ray sources and bright time-variable X-ray sources. Due to a failure of the on-board batteries, the mission ended already few days after launch without any scientific data taken.